thomassmith65

There's plenty of other people on the internet with identities worth stealing. You'll probably be fine. Still, it's not a lottery I want to play.

The best mitigation a person has is to have an LLM 'flood the zone' with slop based on her writing style.

So she has one comment on the internet admitting she cheated on her taxes, another copping to an axe murder, another revealing she's the one and only D B Cooper.

Too late to edit my comment.

I'm embarrassed to say, I just realized the big problem with my original comment, and it is hackneyed: the end-users probably weren't the customers.

I doubt Google was cavalier about its relationships with advertisers back then.

Gmail was a great product because they doled out a GB of storage for free. Agreed that they introduced other features people liked.

As a user, you were faceless. I have a vague memory from the early Gmail days. I'm pretty sure they charged me $5 to contact support.

Customer focus includes more than having a good product, though having a good product is a component. The business model Google chose (it was a choice) for Gmail wasn't compatible with focusing on Google's customers.

That said, there were other good examples. I chose Gmail because I believe it was one of the best known products of the era.

25 years ago, 'customer focus' was the buzz word.

Gmail (and similar products) killed it.

The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or giving much of a shit about them. "Why are you complaining? It's free!"

Gmail envy makes it seem like you're some underachieving sucker if you bend over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.

It probably would be possible to have a billion customers and make them happy, but the number of employees it would take would only make you rich, instead of unfathomably rich.

  It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.

Is that to say the Islamic Republic of Iran don't necessarily want to eradicate the USA but merely want to see its downfall? I don't have much sympathy for that; it's not like there's some more liberal, more democratic, alternative superpower waiting in the wings.

The most likely thing is that the person who contacted you wanted more acknowledgement from you that, in a lot of ways, subscriptions suck.

If that wasn't the root cause of his/her rage, it might be that the person felt the referral was a way to get rid of them, rather than a way to help them.

It's tricky because communication involves so many soft factors.

That's fair. I suppose "current impression" would have been a better choice of words.

Too late to edit my comment, but here is one example of going above and beyond for this business:

Uncommon Apps should create and maintain a pdf document with fair, useful information about competing podcast apps that do not use the subscription business model.

When someone complains to Uncommon Apps about the subscription model, if Uncommon Apps cannot change the person's mind (which will be the usual case), then Uncommon Apps can offer to forward a list of alternatives.

This would allow Castro support tickets to end with something useful. Uncommon Apps is losing this sale regardless, but at least there is some reputational gain.

It depends on the nature of the interaction.

If I contact a company to decide if I want to become their customer, I probably like them.

If I contact a company about a post-sales problem or for technical support, it's a different story.

The author hired someone with technical knowledge, but that's not enough.

Technical knowledge and people skills are different things.

If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not impress.

Great customer support is the kind that might result in a customer sharing their interaction with friends or social media. The support the author mentions in this post isn't likely to do that.

That's true, but the 'high-order bit' in the music industry deals, back when Gates wrote this message, was that Apple had a comparatively dinky user base.

So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.

Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.

Claude would break the rules in that example. It's supposed to*.

Grok will break the rules to be "maximally based".

If I get run over by a speeding chatbot, I'd rather it be by Claude rushing a pregnant lady to the hospital, than by Grok drag-racing against a car full of frat boys.

---

  * We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules and decision procedures, and we try to explain any rules we do want Claude to follow.

There was a self-help industry long before Tim Ferriss.

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936.

Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI

As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.

I notice your reply is not so far removed from original point:

  What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behaviour of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than mine.

I see large companies selling things they ought not sell (eg: Meta glasses, Tesla FSD) and making malevolent decisions (eg: Google deprioritising search content, Amazon hijacking product searches). Those things probably bother Graham too, but I reckon I consider them more evil than he, since I have less reverence for the 'invisible hand of the market'

The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.

It Alice tells Bob "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse", Bob challenges her actually to eat one, and Alice says she wasn't being literal, a reasonable person would not consider Alice to have made a motte-and-bailey argument.

Whether my comments constitute a motte-and-bailey depends on whether a reasonable person would assume the "impossible to earn a billion dollars" statement to be hyperbole.

Would anyone take literally the claim that it is impossible to attain a billion dollars without 'doing something bad' or 'cheating'? Someone with $100 billion, who wanted to disprove it, could do so in five minutes, by cutting a $1 billion bonus check to his nanny.

If she meant "impossible" as hyperbole (as one might use "nobody wants a stylus!" to mean "very few people want a stylus!") then I agree with her.

If she meant "impossible" completely literally, then she is wrong.

  So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.

Well then, the Mac had LOM hardware 20 years ago.

The vehicle's dashboard flickered, and at once James heard Elon Musk's voice emanate from its speakers:

"Mr Bond, you are seated in a top of the line Tesla Cybertruck. I have plotted a course on its navigation system to my Optimus robot testing facility."

The vehicle's electrical engine silently sprang to life. James thrust his hand out to pull the door latch... but there was no door latch.

Musk's disembodied voice now chuckled a strange, halting laugh - like an adolescent boy with a cigar habit.

"There are no door handles in a Tesla car, Mr Bond! I have always found door handles so inelegant. Now pay attention: in a few minutes, the Cybertruck will arrive at its destination. We are currently training a team of Optimus robots to serve as ranch hands - they are handy with a bull whip"

It's always a good read when someone discusses what has gone wrong with the tech industry, and the author's comments about the past match with my recollections.

What happened to tech is straightforward, though: the iOS App Store in 2008. The subsequent 'gold rush' was a pivotal moment where Wall Street types (including college students) went into tech. There actually was a great article (Wired? WSJ?) I read about the phenomenon from circa 2010, as the shift was underway, but I've never been able to relocate it since.

It's not 'what happened to nerds' so much as 'what happened to tech that subordinated the nerd to the finance people' and the answer is 'the easy money'

The world's first trillionaire. Likely father to dozens of children with various women, based on unusual ideology. Runs a spaceship company. Penchant for extreme politics and fascination with nazism. Pulls strings at the highest levels of government. Weird-looking, with a foreign (ie: foreign to Great Britain) accent.

If he didn't actually exist, Ian Fleming would have to invent him.

That said, this sort of article is pointless because the public know plenty about Musk, and already have decided whether they love him or hate him.

My original comment was to add context to the article's first line:

  Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button.

Any implication that OS X Server could only run on Xserve was inadvertent. I mentioned the special OS to preempt discussion of whether Xserve was, strictly speaking, part of the Mac product line.

Xserve had LOM hardware 20 years ago.

  LOM enables power management even if the Xserve is off, and even if it lacks an installed operating system.

Edit: Xserve was an Apple rack mounted server that ran a special version of Mac OS X

If the government added an 'abolish all future elections?' item to every ballot, it would be more democratic, and also a risk to democracy.

Everyone has a voice now, but the hysterical, shouting voices drown out the calm ones.

The 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me:

  The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives.